If you’ve heard that the Royal Danish Ballet is soft and sweet like the breakfast roll, you haven’t been following the press about the company’s edgy artistic director Nicolaj Hubbe, former New York City Ballet star and former principal dancer of the Copenhagen-based troupe. Don’t bother digging up the clips, though. Find a night to attend the company’s run at Cal Performances, which will give you something bigger and more complex to chew on than pastry and p.r. patter.

In town through Saturday, this 363-year-old troupe has enough charm, substance and technical clarity to dispel the idea that they are old-fashioned or lightweight and should make viewers hungry to see more, more often. This is the first time in 50 years they have visited Berkeley.

On Tuesday night, the program veered from psychodrama to Romantic melodrama, and although it lasted three hours with two hefty intermissions —— needed to accommodate the elaborate set changes —— it was worth it.

The concert opened with a work familiar to San Francisco Ballet goers, Fleming Flindt’s harrowing “The Lesson,” based on Eugene Ionesco’s dark play. Crafted with the taut precision of a one-act drama, the ballet takes place in a basement dance studio aglow with distorted mirrors that cast a somewhat golden light on the scene. The action occurs in a fierce triangle between the pianist, dressed like a fascist matron, the ballet master, a Peter Lorre-esque man of imploding needs and explosive tics, and the new arrival, a frothy colt of a student in love with her love of dance.

In any performing art, interpretation determines what we see on stage. When S.F. Ballet dances “The Lesson,” it reads as a minimalist study of a maniacal teacher’s authoritarian control of an earnest, determined and obedient student — a relationship facilitated by the pianist, whose bond with the ballet master is one of mutual sado-masochism. Dance is a metaphor for the regulation of the powerless by the powerful, and the creepy, sexualized defeat of the soul through repetition and control.

Staged by Vivi Flindt and Anne Marie Vessel Schluter, the Danes’ interpretation is fleshier and more quixotic than San Francisco’s, presenting the teacher’s conflict as a battle with the madness of desire — more Freud than Foucault. For centuries in the West, dance has been a route to insanity, and dancing to death is a punishment in both myth and fairy tales. What Thomas Lund in the role of the ballet master does with this theme is so kinesthetically tactile, we enter his condition of perspiring need and desire. Ida Praetorius as the swept-up student and Maria Bernholdt as the dangerous pianist offer him perfect and extreme counterpoints.

The story begins as Bernholdt maniacally arranges chairs and prepares the studio with the exaggerated movements of a German expressionist ghoul. Then Lund creeps into view like a poisonous spider. He seems deranged, although this smooths itself into clear force and direction when his prey, the leggy student, appears at the door as pert as a daisy. A lesson ensues, graduating from exercises at the barre to complex duet phrases — the two fuse in face-to-face grands plies — and before long, the ballet master has devoured his prey. Lund can’t help himself. Then the cycle begins anew.

The night’s second dance was the Romantic icon “La Sylphide,” choreographed by the renowned 19th-century Danish choreographer August Bournonville in1836. “Sylphide” offered viewers a radically different version of dance as intoxication and death, giving a chaste body to human longing for an ideal — a delicate fairy or sylph who seductively visits James, the young groom-to-be, as he sleeps in a chair by the fire. This chimera becomes an obsession and leads James to ignore danger — the witch Madge, whom he foolishly bars from the house. Out of revenge, she sets his sad fate into motion.

Mads Blangstrup as James endowed the role with the urgent energy of a young man seized by imagination and torn between fantasy and the less dazzling concrete world. Tearing through space, ticking off his tours like a man on springs, and embodying the existential divide with a courtly and expressive upper body and face, Blangstrup made this James a guy we championed.

Caroline Cavallo, with an alluring, crooked smile and delicate arms, was a captivating if childlike sylph. Madge was danced with broad theatrical brilliance by Lis Jeppesen, who went toe-to-toe with Blangstrup for the spotlight. The corps in their ensemble dances were spot on and were supported in the pit by the Berkeley Symphony, conducted by Henrik Vagn Christensen — a stalwart companion throughout the night.

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